Dominic opened the front door and strolled inside as if he belonged.

The confident footsteps should avoid tipping off anyone who was in the house. And he could smell more than two people had been here recently.

None of them were on the main floor, though.

"Come downstairs, the ritual is almost finished." Someone called, and Dominic smiled.

It was mighty kind of them to make this easy on him.

Dominic walked downstairs with a carefree gait, right into an ongoing sacrificial ritual.

The mage on the far side of the circle panicked, and began to point at Dominic, but the others were too intent on the spell.

"Focus," an elderly mage complained.

"Monster!" The mage stammered.

The Elder turned, and Dominic smiled as his pistols came up.

Spells flew in one direction, bullets in the other, and everyone threw themselves out of the way the best that they could.

Unfortunately for the Elder and the man whose back had been to Dominic, they were not fast enough, and their blood joined the ritual circle. Dominic crouched as he ran along the wall to flip over a broken desk with a mage behind it.

Two more bullets marked another casualty, and then [Arcane Blast] took out a fourth mage.

Only one was left in the room, tears in his eyes and arms around his legs as he hid in the corner of the room.

"Where, oh where, has my little mage gone? Is he behind the desk?" Dominic sang as he silently circled the other way, careful not to step into the still charged ritual circle.

"Oh dear God of Magic, save this humble soul. Don’t let me die like this." A soft voice chanted, over and over, as Dominic stalked toward him.

"Peekaboo."

The mage screamed in a tone so shrill that Dominic was sure the windows would break, then promptly passed out.

Quickly, he stuffed a rag in the mage’s mouth, and bound his hands, so no ritual magic could be used. Then, Dominic hoisted him on his shoulder and carried the mage up to the main floor.

He waved out the front door, calling the others over, and then returned to his unconscious prisoner.

Only, he realized that he was not alone in the house.

The soft wail of a baby came from upstairs, and Dominic sighed. He was a monster, but he wasn’t a monster.

"Bella, get in here, we’ve got an issue." He shouted out into the storm.

The gunslinger ran inside and looked around, but didn’t find any threats.

"What’s happening? Where is the threat?" She asked.

"There is a crying baby upstairs, and I’m about ninety percent sure that I just murdered its parents."

"And that is an emergency?"

"You’ve got to know more about childcare than I do. The crying is killing my head."

Bella rolled her eyes, while the Duskblade Sect mages laughed.

"We will take care of it. We’re both parents already, we know the drill. Was there a female mage with them? She will most likely have the supplies." He asked.

"Two of them. One in the basement, one under the back porch. Just watch out for the blood ritual in the basement, it’s still charged, and I don’t know what it does."

The mage cursed. "You didn’t let their blood mix with the ritual, did you?"

Dominic had the grace to look embarrassed. "A few of the bodies might have leaked onto it. I used pistols."

While they talked, Amie had already gone upstairs, and came down with twin newborns dangling in a basket made from a folded fuzzy blanket.

"Here, take these. Someone else can check the basement. Maybe take them outside or something, they smell awful." She complained.

"You will be a terrible mother." Her senior Sect member replied.

Amie shrugged. He had the babies now, they were no longer her problem.

Moments later, a very annoyed and wet mage came in from the back door and stomped up the stairs, then came right back down.

"I checked both bodies, neither of them had the supplies. They were in the nursery. From what I can tell, they’ve been here for close to three months. The children are over two months old, and they were almost certainly born here.

The woman in the basement was the mother.

That’s a monster summoning ritual, by the way. They’ve been calling monsters under their control to the area and then dispatching them to the horde." He explained.

Amie snapped her fingers and he shook his head.

"No, the spell won’t work for us to summon our own monsters. They had been sacrificing human lives to it to power the spell, and even if we knew the spell, we would have cast our own. You can’t transfer control of a death ritual." He reminded her.

The little mage sighed. "Well, it was worth a shot. But how are we going to work this? We can’t just bring a pair of newborns with us to hunt monsters, and you can’t stuff them in a storage ring when they’re alive."

"I worry about you.

Seriously, I worry about you a lot.

We are just going to open a portal back to the Sect and give them to the Sect Master. He can have someone raise them there, or give them to a local family who wants to adopt.

Both their parents are presumably mages, so they should be talented when they grow up. We can just tell them that they were foundlings, and they can live out the Orphan fantasy of having a secretly powerful, mysterious bloodline awaken for them as they grow up." He suggested.

The adventurers chuckled at his description of the situation. Indeed, that was a common fantasy among orphans, right behind their parents being wealthy Nobles who had been looking for them for their whole lives.

"What’s with the survivor? He’s starting to wake up." Amie asked, now that the immediate concern was taken care of and someone was changing the babies diapers.

"I saved him for interrogation. He pleaded with the god of magic not to let him die like the others, so I thought that I would oblige." Dominic explained.

Wiz smiled. "I’m good at getting traitors to talk."

The two older mages laughed. "You understand that we’re Battle Mages of the Duskblade Sect, right? We are quite literally professionals at extracting information."

The captured mage’s eyes were wide as he panicked and tried to sign something.

But he was restrained, and Dominic had tied his hands closed, so he couldn’t even get a basic message across.